NOVELS AND POETRY 549 generation, passed now into the background; the adventure of sex, seen increasingly through the heroine's rather than the hero's eyes, took their place. Conrad is the exception; but Conrad, a foreigner who had come into English letters late in life,1 remained in some ways a little archaic. A large proportion of the best novels reflected the keen interest of the time in social criticism and social reform. Here Wells and Galsworthy led, the books of the former rivalling the plays of Bernard Shaw in their wide effect on educated public opinion. Wells, however, was more constructive than Shaw; he not merely swept away the old cobwebs, but indirectly in his novels and directly in his brilliantly written Utopias himself spun many new ones. The preoccupation of literature with politics culminated about 1910. After the exhausting conflicts of that year, with its two general elections, a sort of fatigue set in; and in the remaining years before the war 'pure' literature, as preached by writers like Henry James and George Moore, showed distinct signs of re- asserting itself. How far it was a gain, and whether even as English prose posterity will ultimately value Moore's work above the best of Shaw and Wells, it is too early to judge with finality. In the field of poetry there might well have been more good writers, if there had not till 1911 been virtually no audience for them. Between 1903 and 1908 Thomas Hardy published his epic verse drama, The Dynasts. It would have fallen totally flat but for his reputation as a novelist, and it was not until after the outbreak of the European war that its merits obtained any wide recognition. C. M. Doughty's poetry (nearly all published within this period) was neglected from start to finish. So things went on till in 1911 a much younger man, John Masefield, issued the first of his longer narrative poems, The Everlasting Mercy, and it achieved real popularity. Others followed from him at no very long intervals—two of more merit and almost equally popular. The excitement they set up resembled (though on a smaller scale) that over Scott's and Byron's narrative poems about a century earlier, and rendered to new poetry generally the same vital service that those had in their day—that of causing the public to take notice of it. Between then and the war a number of the younger writers secured some degree of recogni- tion; and the first volume of Georgian Poetry, edited by Edward 1 Born a Russian Pole, he entered the British merchant service in early manhood, and rose to be a captain in it, before retiring on his success as an English novelist.